Review: Perla
by David Katz
- Alexandra Makarová’s second feature is a taut melodrama focusing on the struggles of a resilient Slovak artist who escaped to Vienna following the Prague Spring

Perla (Rebeka Poláková) has spent the majority of her adult life running, only largely in a metaphorical sense. Having fled across the border from Czechoslovakia to Austria following the Prague Spring in 1968, together with her boyfriend (who wasn’t so lucky) and whilst heavily pregnant, that cataclysmic experience has never quite left her. With the main story thread commencing in 1981, she’s now a talented Vienna-based painter, with some international galleries expressing interest in her work, despite the fact she can’t always scrimp enough pennies for her now-grown daughter Julia’s (Carmen Diego) piano tuition. Alexandra Makarová’s second feature, Perla [+see also:
trailer
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film profile], fittingly named after its intrepid heroine, tracks these clashing forces of narrative direction – forward into fulfilment whilst backsliding into unresolved personal history – with aplomb, heading towards a hard-hearted and sober conclusion. The film premiered to a strong response in IFFR’s Tiger Competition.
Whilst a new, older boyfriend in the form of Josef (Simon Schwarz) allows her to belatedly create a secure-seeming nuclear family, this attractive façade only intensifies what she’s suppressing beneath it, as well as the destiny catching up to her. Andrej (Noël Czuczor), the aforementioned former boyfriend, is out of prison – after a stretch for what we assume was activism, hinted at in the archival broadcast that opens the film, warning of the Warsaw Pact nations’ invasion – and gives her an unwanted phone call; he is unwell, he lies, brewing further guilt in Perla that she must return to Košice, and her nearby home village, to settle her affairs.
Makarová, also credited as the sole writer, pivots the film’s source of tension from the second act’s beginning, folding the three main adult characters into a tortured love triangle. Against relative fashion in historical dramas seen at elite festivals, she seems more interested in pure story than discursively shading in the lines with detail or texture – as said, and also underlined by the prominent timestamps at three key points in the film, we are always moving towards catharsis or a reckoning, with the Eastern Bloc’s eventual demise in our minds. However contradictory-sounding it may be, she’s made an “understated” melodrama, with Perla – who writhes with PTSD symptoms clearly related to a sexual assault she suffered whilst fleeing – the sole lively presence in her starkly designed, period detail-perfect frames. Whilst not as complex or destabilising in its manner, it’s not far removed from Christian Petzold’s period films such as Barbara [+see also:
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interview: Christian Petzold
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interview: Christian Petzold
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film profile], or indeed Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, with the might of the Czech communist regime a looming threat.
The movie was developed as part of the female-led film screenwriting programme “If She Can See It, She Can Be It”, and we feel Perla’s characterisation and Poláková’s performance railing against demure interpretations of gender roles and also attitudes to motherhood. She lives for herself in every moment, frustrating the desires of those seeking something from her, never pushed by guilt into being deferential to Josef (who’s unquestionably a decent man), feeling indebted to Andrej, or even swaying to Julia’s strong-willed preferences. The cautious journey back to her homeland is her own prerogative, and business, even if the film’s downbeat ending metes out a punishment that may oddly afford her eventual peace.
Perla is a co-production by Austria and Slovakia, staged by Golden Girls Filmproduktion, Hailstone and Ruth Beckermann Filmproduktion. Its world sales are handled by Cercamon.
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